After three hours of work, Harmon and Nick had still not managed to thread the flexible fiber-optic cable into position to see the nest of mice. Frustration was mounting for both of them, and for the two women. Cathy had finished her survey of the rest of the house. She had found a second nest in the kitchen, and one possible nest in the upstairs bathroom. Mrs. Beloit did not stay with the academics all of the time. Once her children got home from school, she was in and out of the kitchen several times. Though she tried to stay away, she could not.
It was past seven o’clock when Professor Griffin pulled back out of the cabinet under the kitchen sink and shook his head. “I think it’s time to call it a day. We’re not getting anywhere. I’ll leave the cable where it is. We’ll put everything back in the cabinet around it, and try again tomorrow.” He stood up and brushed the legs of his trousers.
“Have you figured out how to get those mice out of here yet?” Mrs. Beloit asked. She and her children had eaten in the living room. Before cooking supper, Mrs. Beloit had rewashed everything that she used to prepare and serve the meal.
“Not yet,” Harmon said. “We’re still trying to get in to see them.”
“Three nests you found.” Marietta Beloit considered that a scandalous affront to her abilities as a homemaker.
Harmon closed his eyes for an instant and took a deep breath. A headache had started to develop over his left eye. “We’ll do our best,” he promised. “It’s not easy to get rid of all of the mice in a building when you’ve got everything going for you, and with these mice being so different, there’s not much chance that any of the usual remedies would work. If they only eat bugs—and I’m guessing that they’re that specialized—regular poison or traps wouldn’t help. Poisoned baits aren’t all that effective anyway. Regular mice can often tell without taking a lethal dose. That leaves gasses. Ether poison bait or gas leaves dead mice in the walls to rot. You don’t want that.”
“There must be some way,” she insisted.
“You can’t possibly want those mice out more than we do, Mrs. Beloit. It’s important for us to get as many of them as possible, and—if we can—alive.”
“I wish Pickles was still here,” Mrs. Beloit said, looking around to make sure that none of her children were close enough to hear. “Pickles was always a good mouser. She even caught a couple of rats over in the park last fall.”
“But a cat can’t get up inside the walls to where those nests are,” Griffin said, also speaking softly. “Like I said, we’ll do everything we can.” He glanced at the wall, near the location of the first nest, then looked at Mrs. Beloit again, hesitating, unsure whether he should plant ideas in her head. But he was tired, and his head hurt. ‘There is one thing, if all else fails,” he said.
“What’s that?”
“If you took a metal pie pan and beat on the bottom with a heavy metal spoon, right about here,”—he indicated a spot just in front of where Cathy had found the first concentration of mice—“some of them might drop dead of heart attacks.”
“You’re kidding me now,” Marietta charged.
Harmon smiled and shook his head. “Mice really are very delicate, timid creatures. It’s not hard to literally scare them to death. A sharp noise where they don’t expect it can kill them. They produce too much adrenaline and the bodies’ systems overload. Seriously,” he added when he saw the skeptical look on her face. “But that would be as bad as poison, leave dead mice rotting inside the walls, smelling the place up.”
“I hope I’m not going to have to tear holes in the walls to get rid of them,” Mrs. Beloit said.
It was near sunset when Harmon and his assistants finally left. There had been a little rain earlier and everything was damp. The slight breeze carried a heavy, musty smell.
Harmon let Cathy and Nick into the van, then walked around to the driver’s side. In front of the vehicle, he stopped for an instant and raised a hand to his head, pressing back against a sudden increase in the pain over his left eye.
“That’s all I need,” he muttered, closing his eyes briefly. It would take all night to get rid of the ache, even using larger-than-recommended doses of aspirin.
Preoccupied, he almost didn’t notice the wavy line of black paint that had been sprayed along the side of the van. He had opened his door and started to climb in before he did. Harmon stopped his motion and cursed under his breath for a moment.
“What is it?” Cathy asked.
“Some bright soul with a spray can left his mark,” Harmon said. He looked at the line. “Must have been just before it started raining. Some of the paint ran.”
“I hope there was a good coat of wax on the van,” Nick said.
“You must be kidding,” Harmon said. “The university waste money to wax a vehicle?”
They were almost back to the university before talk moved away from the vandalism.
“How are we going to get the mice out?” Cathy asked. “Even if we find some way to lure out all of the adults, any nursing babies will be left in the nests.”
“We’re not exterminators, anyway,” Nick said. “Sure, we want to study the mice, but we don’t need all of them. If we can study them in place, that’s best, but failing that, as long as we get enough to establish a viable breeding colony in the lab we’ve succeeded, haven’t we?”
“I suppose,” Griffin said. His headache was rapidly getting worse. “I’d take all of them if we could get them, have a few to trade to other labs, maybe. Those elephant-nosed mice are going to be worth a relative fortune for some time to come. If we had the money available, we’d offer to relocate the Beloits, at least temporarily, go in and do whatever we had to do to get the mice, then repair the damage afterward.”
“Isn’t this important enough to get more research money?” Cathy asked. “We have good evidence of the mice now.”
“If we were willing to wait a year, maybe two years, while the requests were processed and subjected to peer review and all the rest of the red tape, we might get enough interest and a few dollars. But in that time…” He shook his head. They would have to publish what they had already, the photographs, DNA investigation, and so forth. Other researchers would start looking right away. Money would probably be found somewhere for the job, but there was no guarantee that Harmon Griffin would be the first to get it. There were other biologists with better connections, and more secure scientific reputations, than his. “We’ll do what we can, and whatever Mrs. Beloit will permit. Remember, we’re in her home strictly on her sufferance.”
4.
The ants were still in the glass dishes in the traps the next day. No mice had been captured. The video cameras had spotted mice investigating both traps, but they had not taken the bait.
It took another two hours of work for Harmon and Nick to get their fiber-optic system into the first nest. With the video camera running, Mrs. Beloit and the three researchers spent much of the next hour watching activities in the nest. Harmon counted eight adult mice. There seemed to be two separate litters of pups, but it wasn’t possible to get an accurate count on them.
The presence of the probe in one of the nest entrances did provoke a certain amount of activity among the normally nocturnal mice. Several investigated the intruder. A couple squeezed alongside, out of range of the camera, apparently following the cable back as if searching for its origin. Except for the pups and nursing mothers, all of the mice eventually left the nest.